FTFA: When you think of the face of white rage in America, it belongs to a red-faced Irish dude on Fox News.

Actually that sort of makes some sense to me in a historical context. FOX News is the propaganda arm of the GOP. The GOP's base are the ones raging at what they perceive to be the end of white entitlement in America. The Irish in America took so long to qualify to even get into the club of white entitlement they of course would be the most pissed that that club membership no longer means what it used to. It's small minded and selfish but I do get it.

fusillade762:It is kinda funny how many Irish-American talking heads spew bile about immigrants. How conveniently they forget their own history.

That's the point of his entire article, and I think it's a valid one.

The conquering and colonization of Ireland was one of the original sins of western colonialism. The way the Irish were treated was the same as nearly every other oppressed peoples on the earth and to a degree that was certainly horrific.

When they came to America, they elevated their social status by basically allying with the white power structure, and in return were granted a small pass into that power structure, which they have expanded over time until we get to modern day Irish-Americans.

If I had to paraphrase what Mr. O'Hehir is saying, it'd be "Hey, did we forget that this failing system of privilege and classism that we're so willing to support these days is the same system that treated us as the shiatstains of the western world?"

fusillade762:It is kinda funny how many Irish-American talking heads spew bile about immigrants. How conveniently they forget their own history.

I think it is called something like "new convert vigor" though this is probably the wrong phrase because I can't google anything up.

People who transition to what they see as the dominant or morally superior in-group are particularly vigorous in attacking outsiders to prove they really belong or made the right decision. This appears to happen in all sorts of contexts - you can find people saying things like "recently converts to vegetarianism are really obnoxious".

Ireland was the original colonized nation, and was subjected to a near-genocidal conquest centuries before the Holocaust. It was where the policies of the British Empire were road-tested for use in India and Africa, and where a subject population stripped of property and political rights was then blamed for its own poverty. The island's native people, despite their white skin, were viewed as savage and barbaric because they did not speak English, practiced an alien religion and hewed to unfamiliar cultural customs. During the Great Famine of the 1840s, which produced a huge wave of Irish emigration to America, the Irish poor were starved to death or driven off their own land by the millions. Yes, the potato - a plant imported from South America by the British - had been ruined by blight, but the famine itself was avoidable. Its true cause was not the black fungus that turned the prátaí to inedible mush, but a pseudo-Darwinian, proto-Milton Friedman free market ideology, insisted upon at a time when Ireland as a whole was a net exporter of food.

This is what many Irish-Americans have forgotten, or, far more likely, have never known. The Irish were a brutally oppressed people for hundreds of years. They were slaughtered, starved, kept impoverished and exploited by England for cheap labor. Sound familiar?

HairBolus:fusillade762: It is kinda funny how many Irish-American talking heads spew bile about immigrants. How conveniently they forget their own history.

I think it is called something like "new convert vigor" though this is probably the wrong phrase because I can't google anything up.

People who transition to what they see as the dominant or morally superior in-group are particularly vigorous in attacking outsiders to prove they really belong or made the right decision. This appears to happen in all sorts of contexts - you can find people saying things like "recently converts to vegetarianism are really obnoxious".

I find the phrase "no one more zealous than a convert" pretty useful.

Although specifically in the case of the Irish in America I'd go with "Last one invited up into the tree fort is the first one to vote for pulling the rope up behind him."

I also find that last one useful when in threads where RWers gleefully pull out stats about non acceptance of gay civil rights in black churches in an attempt to sow discord among two of the Dems more reliable voting blocks..

brainiac-dumdum:Ireland was the original colonized nation, and was subjected to a near-genocidal conquest centuries before the Holocaust. It was where the policies of the British Empire were road-tested for use in India and Africa, and where a subject population stripped of property and political rights was then blamed for its own poverty. The island's native people, despite their white skin, were viewed as savage and barbaric because they did not speak English, practiced an alien religion and hewed to unfamiliar cultural customs. During the Great Famine of the 1840s, which produced a huge wave of Irish emigration to America, the Irish poor were starved to death or driven off their own land by the millions. Yes, the potato - a plant imported from South America by the British - had been ruined by blight, but the famine itself was avoidable. Its true cause was not the black fungus that turned the prátaí to inedible mush, but a pseudo-Darwinian, proto-Milton Friedman free market ideology, insisted upon at a time when Ireland as a whole was a net exporter of food.

This is what many Irish-Americans have forgotten, or, far more likely, have never known. The Irish were a brutally oppressed people for hundreds of years. They were slaughtered, starved, kept impoverished and exploited by England for cheap labor. Sound familiar?

Of course the other interesting part is the reason for the lack of action from the UK Parliament was a belief in laissez faire, markets will sort things out if left to themselves, policies. So having "government bad"/libertarian views is particularly ironic from someone of Irish extraction.

Al Zeimer And that's where he's wrong. the pseudo-Darwinian, proto-Milton Friedman free market ideology did not obtain at the time.It is true that the folks who took over the Brit government in 1846 were more free-trade than the ones before, but certainly not to the extent thav they repealed the penal laws of the 1690s.

The sort of people who are today ceaselessly squawking about "the free market" are the ideological ancestors of the English business-government ruling class, with the common thread being that whatever lines their pockets is good. The Penal Laws were merely a tool crafted to be most appropriate to the specific situation. Ideological libertarians exist only on the Internet; those who call themselves "libertarians" and have real political or economic power are invariably only saying it to score cred with dupes.

Al Zeimer:Also, the guy who wrote the article is pretty much entirely ignorant of the causes of the famine.

LOLWUT.

Although the potato crop failed, the country was still producing and exporting more than enough grain crops to feed the population. Records show during the period Ireland was exporting approximately thirty to fifty shiploads per day of food produce. As a consequence of these exports and a number of other factors such as land acquisition, absentee landlords and the effect of the 1690 penal laws, the Great Famine today is viewed by a number of historical academics as a form of either direct or indirect genocide.

phalamir: The problem with the Irish is how selfish they are. God plainly desired them to die in 1845. And instead accepting their degenerate mongrel race needed to die for the greater good, they instead moved to America, infecting a land of good, upright, morally superior whiteness, with their fetid anti-God, anti-Anglo-Saxon quagmire. And then, to compound their sins, they try and pass as human beings, further dragging America down into their mud-blood, Papist pool of filth. At least a n*gger can pick cotton! But the only thing a mick can pick is a fight.

I think that is the funniest comment I've seen on fark since the Weeners on this page:

HairBolus:fusillade762: It is kinda funny how many Irish-American talking heads spew bile about immigrants. How conveniently they forget their own history.

I think it is called something like "new convert vigor" though this is probably the wrong phrase because I can't google anything up.

People who transition to what they see as the dominant or morally superior in-group are particularly vigorous in attacking outsiders to prove they really belong or made the right decision. This appears to happen in all sorts of contexts - you can find people saying things like "recently converts to vegetarianism are really obnoxious".

Shostie:When the Provisional Irish Republican Army agreed to end its paramilitary insurgency (and/or terrorist campaign) against British rule in Northern Ire-

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...

This was kinda a big deal for people in the British Isles, particularly Londoners who had spent a couple of decades living with the IRA regularly bombing the city and calling in credible bomb threats that shut good chunks of infrastructure down.